Paul Corfield wrote:

Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited
capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and
most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have
four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our
express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become
a lot more popular, by necessity.

I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of
London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your
subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but
a mere shadow of London's?

By "rail network" he must mean only LU vs. NYCT. National Rail in the
southeast would surely dwarf LIRR+MNR+PATH.

In my (albeit limited)
experience of the NYC rush hour you get pretty high frequencies on
common sections of route served by multiple services but if you want a
particular letter / number then frequency drops noticeably compared to
almost all of London's tube service pattern.

Hmmm, does it really compare that poorly with waiting for a train to,
say, a particular branch of the District line?
--
Michael Hoffman